Searching for search: a high-level guide to finding the right information-access solution

According to surveys, most companies are dissatisfied with their ability to easily find information inside their own walls, meaning they have yet to find the right search tool for their business.

Given the slew of tools on the market, how can you find the appropriate one? Answering that question involves a dizzying array of factors, but  three critical things to examine are:

* Connectivity: the ability to easily navigate around internal and external (Web) data from a variety of specific sources.

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According to surveys, most companies are dissatisfied with their ability to easily find information inside their own walls, meaning they have yet to find the right search tool for their business.

Given the slew of tools on the market, how can you find the appropriate one? Answering that question involves a dizzying array of factors, but  three critical things to examine are:

* Connectivity: the ability to easily navigate around internal and external (Web) data from a variety of specific sources.

* Effort: the ability to implement, maintain, customize and use a solution with minimum expenditure of manpower and time.

* Scalability: the ability to accommodate large volumes of unstructured and structured to data keep pace as the company evolves.

These criteria offer a framework for assessing your company's data situation and how it may change over time, the ultimate concern when it comes to information access. These are also the criteria that most vendors highlight, so here are a few benchmarks for assessing your needs and vendor promises.

Connectivity

The amount of data that companies generate is staggering and shows no sign of slowing. IDC estimated that digital content and replicated data exceeded 281 exabytes in 2007 and expects it to grow 10 times before 2011. Moreover, the type of data to be searched and indexed is changing from mostly document-based structured data to a combination of structured and file-based, unstructured data (such as rich media). In a 2007 study by the Taneja Group, 73% of users surveyed indicated that 60% or more of their data is unstructured.

What's more, the information that must be queried is all over, some on local devices, some with databases and legacy applications, and still more outside the firewall with software-as-a-service applications and on the Web.

As such, connectivity to different data sources has become a major factor in successful, enterprise search implementations.

Answering a few basic but important questions will take you far in determining the level of connectivity you need:

* What kind of information does your organization need to succeed?

* What context is required to give the information sufficient meaning?

* In what way should data be combined, integrated or processed?

* How many and what kind of users need to access this data?

* What will the access frequency be?

* Since connectivity has implications for performance and ease of use, what kind of indexing capabilities and results presentation does your business decision-making demand?

* How do you imagine your business -- and your data pool -- changing over time?

Solutions designed to meet the broad information-access needs of larger corporations -- thousands of users, hundreds of queries per second, documents in the high millions -- offer essentially unlimited connectivity. Of course, the downside is often complex search interfaces that can impede intuitive search, and the platforms can be expensive to customize, integrate and deploy. The key is finding a solution that gives you the connectivity you'll need with the simplicity you want. This is where effort comes in.